Monday, October 30, 2006

After a seemingly very long hiatus . . .

Noble (or should I say Patient) readers, this post is mainly to let you know that I still exist, and still intend to travel, and still intend to post about it.There are a couple reasons I haven’t posted in the last month or so, the main one being that the journeys I’ve been on have been far more internal than external.The body does surprising things when it’s taken off of five years of medical treatments, and the roller coaster of going through puberty as a 33-year-old afraid of cancer has been, shall we say, a little distracting for everyone involved.

I have slept in two beds other than my own, and flown somewhere, since boat class (come on, people, hire me!Really!), so I’ll give a brief rundown of those.

First, the flying:Ian and I, in September, took our architect up to Orcas to walk around the property and talk about where we wanted to build our house.Rather than pay him for six hours of transit time (which is about how long a round-trip is on the ferry), we decided to fly on Kenmore Air, which is the largest seaplane fleet in the US (that may be true; I maybe made it up.).

Let me tell you, if you’re not planning to plant trees or slash long grass or otherwise carry a lot of stuff, this is the way to go.It took us less than ten minutes to get from our Wallingford house to the South Lake Union terminal in Seattle, about 20 minutes to wait for our plane, about an hour to fly up there, below the clouds, looking down on the tops of people’s private lives, and then the plane lands in West Sound within walking distance, about ten minutes, of our land.Boy, it was awesome.And, it turns out, I’m not afraid of flying in small planes at all.We all had lunch in the West Sound Café, meandered around wet pasture for a couple hours, then caught a flight back to Seattle.So convenient.So awesome.So expensive.

About two weeks later, I was up on Orcas again, this time for the annual West Sound Water Users Association meeting.It was far less interesting than last year’s contentious event, as tempers have been boiling all year this year already, and so lots of people just didn’t come.But the cookies were good.And I stayed at the Kingfish Inn, upstairs from the West Sound Café, which was a lovely place to stay.I particularly enjoyed drinking wine and eating cheese on my own private balcony looking over West Sound, after spending the day clearing brush out of our willow copse.

And just last week, Ian turned 32 and I surprised him with a night in a fancy new hotel in downtown Seattle which is perhaps most notable for the pedestal tub that fills from the ceiling, without splashing.We had a great time.

Stay tuned, we have a couple other small things coming up.But the next big thing?Who knows . . .